Thursday, January 30, 2014

Every time when I do a fresh install of Ubuntu or Mint, I install again my favourite apps, themes ...
It seems to be hard to reinstall applications, to re-add PPAs and to re-find themes and icon packs is akin to a ‘necessary chore'.

But there is a tool that can help simplify the entire process. It is called Aptik.
The app simply lets you create a Back up of your PPAs,Themes and icons, APT Cache, and your Favourites Software. So that can be easy to restore again after a fresh install.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

WindowsXP will end up dead and almost entirely in the month of April 2014, but if you want to keep It alive in the computer, there is a way to make Ubuntu or Linux Mint looks like Windows XP if you like their theme.

The goal of the design of this attribute, is to provide a similar interface for those who have just moved from Windows XP or wanting to move to It.

To install the feature of Windows XP on Ubuntu \ LinuxMint Open a new terminal window and paste the following five commands :

Monday, January 27, 2014

Today which is January 27, 2014, the support for Ubuntu 13.04 is ended, which was backed up for 9 months, and therefore Canonical will not provide any security updates or fixes for the problems nor software updates for this version of Ubuntu.

Canonical pushes users to upgrade to the newest version as soon as possible which is Ubuntu13.10,note: The instructions and caveats for the upgrade process is detailed on the following link :

1 - Reduce Swappiness :

It is the operation of moving processes out of physical memory and onto the swap disk. Because disks are much slower than RAM, this can lead to slower response times for system and applications if processes are too aggressively moved out of memory.

If you are looking for good performance to your Linux machine, you can change swappiness value between 0 and 100. A recommended setting for swappiness is 10.

To check your current used Swappiness, run this command:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The default value is 60, to change it now :

sudo sysctl -w vm.swappiness=10

But changes will be just for this session.

To make changes permanent , edit this file:

sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Search for this line (if not present, just add it):

vm.swappiness=10

Save your file and exit.

2 - Disabling Unnecessary Startup Applications :

There are many applications that starts with the system, and they are unneeded for that.Starup Applications is used to unable and disable Startup applications.

3 - Replace some of your Favorited applications by lightweight ones :

LibreOffice : AbiWord and Gnumeric Spreadsheet

Nautilus : Thunar or PCManFM

Gnome-Panel : FBPanel

Gnome-Terminal : XTerm

4 - Disable some Tty :

Your system comes with 6 Tty, some of them are not necessary.

To disable then, type in the terminal :

sudo gedit /etc/securetty

Then add # from tty2 to tty6

and save the changes.

5 - Preload :

Preload is a daemon that runs in the background that stores most used applications in cache so that they can be called quickly, which will result in quick system load time.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

This list of commands which we are going to show later helps changing various theme-related settings in Gnome based desktop.

These commands work with Gnome 3, Unity, Cinnamon, Mate desktop, and also the old Gnome 2 desktop(if you still using it).

Why we need to type some commands to get it done instead of a Gui tool ?

This is important to ask in such situation. In Gnome 2(and Mate today) all the these settings can be easily changed using build-in Gui tool called Appearance Preferences. Unfortunately in modern desktops such as Unity Gnome 3 ... we have Gui tools that can do the same, like Gnome Tweak Tool, Ubuntu Tweak, or MyUnity, but with limitations. It means that "Appearance Preferences" (Gui tool to tweak Gnome 2 and Mate)is powerful than any other tweaking tool.

Since "Appearance Preferences" doesn't come with all desktops except Mate, The command line will be the only replacement.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Pinguy OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution, which aims to be more easy and user-friendly for new comers to Linux, It comes with lot of enhancement features in order to target numerous beginners.

Once It is installed, out-of-the-box supports multimedia codecs and browser plugins, and It comes with a good selection of common applications with tweaked Gnome user interface with enhanced menus, panels and dockbars.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Vokoscreen is one of the best App for recording the desktop, built on the top of FFMPEG.
This is a Gui application for Screencasting that works with almost Desktops such as Unity, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon, Mate ...

Some advantages of Vokoscreen :

- Record in full-screen or a window,or record a specific area in the screen.
- The possibility of zooming.
- Record the video directly from the webcam.
- The Format of the video will be either mkv or avi depending on your choice.
- Record the audio in the Format MP3.
- The possibility to choose between displaying the cursor or hiding it.